Vargas on 'biggest story of my life'

“Documented” is the new immigration documentary from Jose Antonio Vargas that is the centerpiece film at this year’s AFI Docs festival in Washington, D.C., and it tracks the one-time Washington Post reporter’s personal story as an undocumented immigrant (he revealed his undocumented status in a New York Times magazine piece in 2011).

“To me, immigration means I don’t have a driver’s license, I don’t have a green card and I don’t have a passport,” Vargas told POLITICO. “I came to this country in August 1993 and I haven’t seen my mother in twenty years this August. … To me, a broken immigration system means broken families, which means broken lives and I think that’s one of the messages of the film.”

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Since Vargas’s New York Times magazine piece, he’s become perhaps the most public undocumented immigrant in the United States (he graced the cover of TIME magazine in 2012, along with others). It’s a level of exposure that Vargas says he’s not always comfortable with.

“Journalism has been my church,” Vargas said. “This is all I’ve ever known how to do. And when you’re a journalist, there’s such a separation because you’re not supposed to be the story. And that’s been the hardest thing I’ve been dealing with for the past two years. … I’m just using whatever platform I have to tell the story and for me it’s been hard that it’s so personal. Sometimes I wish I was just working on a really long New Yorker essay that had nothing to do with me. But it’s personal and it’s hard. The hardest stories we tell are the ones about ourselves.”

It’s a lesson that Vargas says he learned from journalist Michael Hastings, who died in a car crash this week. Hastings profiled Vargas for BuzzFeed and Vargas said Hastings was “pushing me really hard because he could sense how torn I was still about the fact that I’m now the story.” Vargas said Hastings said, “Jose, dude, don’t be scared. Show more pain, man. Show more pain. Dig deeper.”

Vargas said Hastings’ death is “a great loss. I still kind of can’t believe it.”

Vargas said journalists need to earn the credibility that comes with self-reflective writing.

“All I’m doing is working on the biggest story of my life, it just happens to concern me. … In the more social media culture, where you, as a journalist sometimes are forced to use ‘I,’ ‘me,’ and ‘my,’ I feel like we have to earn those words to use them. How do we use them in such a way that we’re actually improving the story? That we’re actually serving the story? That we’re not serving our egos, but we’re serving the story? I think that’s the hard part.”

Vargas said that, should he ever obtain a passport, “I really want to go to Canada, Prince Edward Island. … I just want to see the world. I want a passport and roll.”